Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

roused it back to life. I’d lifted the lid and it had fled. Now my hand was on my flesh and fur, my red hue, warm. Who is it we touch, Ruth, when we touch our own skin? Is it not, often enough, someone other than we expected? We miss her, the expected one, by a split second—she has just slipped out the storm door, and we seek her, up at the skin surface, not understanding.

“Classic, Mave,” said Belinda flatly. She’d unwrapped some kind of metal dragon incense burner, held it as if it were a dead kitten. Mave stood against the wall with her hands shoved in her pockets, loving the gag. A gift to her from one of her school bus kids who was into fantasy and picked on, and she’d rewrapped it. Miranda puffed her downturned lips.

My abdomen was hard and watertight. Only Clay and Mave and Clarissa knew I was pregnant, and probably Tess. Clay wanted a little girl and wanted to tell everyone, but I’d said not yet. And I would not sit in that seat near the foul line on the gym floor. No baby shower for me. I’d refused the bridal shower too—instead, Mave had come over with a set of nesting dolls made in Ukraine, each one with perfect circles on the cheeks. We’d both cracked up.

I tried to unwrap the sticky paper from a glittered stale cake, then abandoned the effort. The pink mints looked like tiny hard pillows for a tiny hard woman to lay her head on. After the gifts, women milled about and got ready for the games—they would guess Jack’s favorite color and shirt size, the baby’s name, the mother’s measurements.

“You got an eye for decorating,” Jennie said to Miranda. One of Jack’s sisters fawned over the gift table, but kept at some distance as though the art piece might bite. I stood to go and said goodbye to Clarissa.

“But you’ll miss the fun,” she said, and Tess handed me a favor from the table, the stale marshmallow snowman, laughing and widening her eyes. I said I had to relieve Clay, he was watching Lottie. Mave would stay to heckle; she waved me on. I crossed the gym floor’s faded out-of-bounds line, removed the snowman’s licorice-smelling hat, and put him in my hot bitter mouth.

IT’S TRUE I MEANT TO HEAD HOME to help Clay after Belinda’s shower. He’d been sitting with Lottie, and he was due at Danny’s for practice. They practiced there now, because of her, so I hardly ever saw Stew after he sobered up and rejoined. But instead I drove to my own house sitting spectral on the hillside. Tess was on my mind now, and I wanted to find the book of van Gogh’s letters you gave me, with his plates of paintings, thinking I’d give them to her. They were somewhere in the closet of my old room, with the LaFaber League participation trophies of gold plastic and the bedspread I’d lain under as an orphaned teen. I was tired; I thought I would lie down a while in my room.

Screen door scuff on the porch, a sound I always heard before I heard it, such dust on everything, an extra layer of dark. I stood still. Inside me, a hot cinder. I made it as far as the kitchen table, then sat, my legs light and boneless, my palms to my belly, its tight hot skin pulsing through the dress, then pain, god, like a wrenching. I gripped the table, reached down and pulled back blood. My throat closed to a wheeze, I fumbled for the paper bags still kept in a drawer, I breathed into one, sucking and puffing out the bag. I made it to the bathroom, another deep cramp and I dropped the bag and held onto the towel in its ring so to not fall, and with the other hand I held a cake of lavender soap, some version of it sitting forever on the white saucer by the sink year to year to year. I held it, smelled it, knew I needed to get to the phone, vaguely remembering I’d disconnected the phone, then so dizzy I let go and felt my body sway as if it were someone else’s, toward the edge of the tub.

A dream—still sharp to me now—held me in strict channel, vivid like a memory because it was a memory as fully as it was a dream: I am on my house’s porch in the full frothed air of a summer noon. My mother alive but like a colorless lithograph. Mave there too, but it’s in that season when she is back and forth from Northampton and starting to pull away. All hands occupied with work, and on the overturned washtub sits a jar of water with a molded peony stem, ugly, like a furred typhoid tongue, so big that I know I am small. The dense air wads into curled blooms fallen from the Rose of Sharon, the white infolding the dark pink stain. At the edges, the forsythia, long done.

On either side of the washtub peony, Mother and Mave string half-runner beans for the canner. A colander and a soup pot full of picked beans sit on TV trays. Newspaper stretches lazily across each lap to catch the throwaway caps and strings. A bowl between them to catch each bean strung and snapped. Where I sit on the porch floor with my own smaller bowls, I am eye level with their laps, with the newspapers that crease down in between their knees. The pages—the funnies or world news—flap down off their thighs like the V-birds I know how to draw in a landscape. You make little Vs in front of the round sun for effect, some just above the trees, some small which means far off, some big and wide to be up close. There’s a broken wingtip when the lead breaks from pressing too hard. The V-birds ring